DayZ's Rocket wants standalone alpha in November

DayZ mastermind Dean "Rocket" Hall already pledged his intention of releasing the standalone version of his hit open-world zombie-em-up " before the end of the year ," but in an interview with VG247 , he revealed that his timeframe includes a potential November launch for the alpha.

"I think the most important thing is we deal with hacking, bugs, duping, new content, tidying up some of the features and expanding them a bit," he said. "I think if we can get that base -- by the end of November or December -- then that means January and February will be really happy, fun times."

Hammerpoint Interactive's The War Z, a similar game whose development has been influenced by DayZ's design, heads into alpha next week , followed by a closed beta on October 31.

Hall also felt hampered by DayZ's slowed development time, calling it a "challenge" and a detractor of "how ambitious we can be with the actual content," but he promised the release date stays unaffected. As for future updates, Hall preferred a three-tiered build rollout, starting with internal testing before inviting the public for QA and finalizing a stable patch.

"Code-wise, the updates will be quite well planned -- like Minecraft updates ended up being with update Fridays and all that," he said. "I think content will come out as it's done."